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It's All In Good Fun…

It’s Friday once again. Good Friday, actually. That’s convenient, given the title.

Today’s post will be brief, as I do have some web work to take care of this afternoon before kicking off the Friday night shenanigans with all of my usual suspects. I just want to give some special recognition to a group of women that I met via Twitter. It might be hard to imagine making “real” friends on the internet. But, just because we don’t exist in each others’ physical world, doesn’t make the bond any less real.

Thanks to Facebook (and Myspace years before that), I am better friends now with people from my high school, than I was when we were teenagers. There’s something about social media that breaks down all of those barriers and labels that previously separated us. We’re not part of “clicks” anymore. We’re all just people. People who fall in and out of love, who marry, divorce, buy homes, lose jobs, run marathons, love their pets, have kids, play video games, listen to music, yell from a soapbox, who rejoice, who grieve, and who suddenly have all of the confidence to share these details with the rest of the world.

Twitter was a bit harder for me. At first, my only Twitter friends were people I knew in “real” life. What was the point? It didn’t take long for me to learn how to work the system. I got brave enough to follow people…strangers…who had similar interests to mine. Within a short amount of time, I found myself engaged in funny conversations (and sometimes heated debates) about all of my favorite things: Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, Supernatural…It’s been awesome.

Not a lot of people understand the whole “fangirl” lifestyle. I’ve been this way since childhood. All of my free time and money was spent at Nassau Mall, either in the game room (zomg the game room!), the record store, or the comic book store. As I got older, and was expected to be interested more in boys and sneaking wine coolers in the 7-11 parking lot, I put away my “toys” and complied. But, what my friends didn’t know, was that I remained a closeted fangirl. Sure, they saw all of the pin-ups from Teen Beat magazine splattered on my walls. But they didn’t see the boxes of collectible toys (Star Wars, Smurfs, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, Barbie…), or the boxes of comic books (I collected Archie and Laugh Digests, but loved to read superhero comics and TMNT), or the video games for my Commodore 64, Atari 2600, and later, Super Nintendo. And I lived at the movie theatre. Pop culture is in my blood.

When I got older, I met someone who was a closeted “fanboy” in his own right. It didn’t take long before we managed to free one another. Our baby’s nursery was half Sesame Street and half Star Wars. Every home we’ve lived in has been decorated in an eclectic mix of movie and comic book memorabilia, weaponry, and books as far as the eye can see. We’ve burned through countless DVR boxes due to our love of television. And then came Twitter.

In the last year, especially, I have had the pleasure…nee…the privilege…of meeting a group of women on Twitter who are just as obsessed with The Walking Dead as I am. At first, that’s all our conversations consisted of: clicking like on each others’ comments and memes, maybe the occasional retweet. But soon, I learned more about them as people. These women are smart. They are funny. They are strong. They are entrepreneurs. They are survivors. They are inspirations. And I am so thankful to have “met” them. I can only hope that one day I will have the opportunity to meet them in the “real” world. This morning, one of them included me in a tweet saying that I was a “Saint” in her “Boondocks”. Morning made!

I won’t list them all on this blog, for the sake of privacy. But, ladies…I trust that you know who you are. And I thank you for entertaining me, supporting me, for twatching TWD with me, for stalking Norman with me, and just for being YOU.

3 thoughts on “It's All In Good Fun…”

Right back at ya! The World Wide Web was a game-changer for all of us. It made the world smaller; started a whole way of doing business; brought down a few corrupt governments and made the word “Viral” a good thing!

I’ve met some amazing people on Twitter. I became so close with one gal I actually flew to Kansas for a week to stay with her and even though it was the first time we’d ever met I felt like I’ve known her my whole life. I used to be really into Twitter but I’ve slacked as of late because it takes a lot of time and energy to keep up with the conversations and my husband always says “What exactly do you DO on there?” I’m a Facebooker who plans on eventually making more of a Twitter effort, or tweffort as I like to take as many words as possible and convert them into twords.